


My soul is bigger than my body (I don’t know myself at all)

by 44TayLo



Category: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (TV 2003)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Greek myths and poetry are referenced because I'm me, Not Beta Read, romantic relationships are background and one-sided, typical Leo wump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-03 22:06:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16334102
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/44TayLo/pseuds/44TayLo
Summary: "It’s amazing, Leo thinks, how his brain crosses wires so that completely unrelated phenomena appear to determine the continued health and happiness of his family.Don calls it anxiety. Leo calls it being on the offensive."A quick character study on Leonardo. Set after season five (“The Lost Season”).





	My soul is bigger than my body (I don’t know myself at all)

**Author's Note:**

> I didn't really mean to write this, it just kind of happened. I haven't written TMNT fanfic in YEARS, and it's been even longer since I've written in present-tense. I wrote this in a single, quick sitting, and only edited it once (which is extremely unusual for me). So...idk. Take it for what you will.

There is no constant, but change. This is something Leo is intimately aware of. Reality, as immovable as it appears to mortal, desperate eyes, is actually quite mutable, and time has never been linear. It’s fitting, then, that it takes him time, and no small amount of effort, to accept that there are things he simply can’t control. 

The wind whips around him, cooling feverish skin and chilling him to the bone. He shouldn’t be out here alone. If he blinks, they could cease to exist. If he holds his breath, they could be killed. It’s amazing, Leo thinks, how his brain crosses wires so that completely unrelated phenomena appear to determine the continued health and happiness of his family.

 

Don calls it anxiety. Leo calls it being on the offensive. 

 

At night, when sleep won’t come and every twitch, every sound, every thought threatens to end their lives, Leo secretly wonders if maybe Don is on to something. Leo has never had the luxury of basking in his sins, though, so he strengthens his resolve like the tempered steel of his blades and forces himself to consider everything that could go wrong. That eventually will go wrong.

 

Someone has to bare this burden.

 

When Leo was ten, he found a book of Greek myths in the sewers. He read the story of Achilles, and he couldn’t breathe. He moved on to Atlas, and he cried. His brothers weren’t as affected by the stories.

“Pfft, I would’ve never let myself get hit by that arrow,” Raph proclaimed.

Mikey hung backwards off of the back of the couch, his head lying on the seat next to Leo, who continued to read from the book with a measured voice. “He’s like a superhero! His heel was his kyrptonite.” 

“It’s completely preposterous,” Donnie said with a roll of his eyes. He was doing his best to ignore them, tinkering with various bits of metal that he swore could be assembled into a functioning computer. “Even if invincibility was achievable, it wouldn’t come from a magic river.”

Leo hummed, his mouth pressed in a tight line. The book in his lap suddenly felt heavy and uncomfortable, the hard corners and stiff binding digging into his skin. He closed the book with an audible smack. 

“Aw, come on Leo, keep reading!” Mikey begged. He shifted around on the couch, righting himself even as Leo moved towards his room.

Knuckles white and chest heavy, he ignored his brothers. He could hear Raph asking “What’s with him?” to no one in particular, but his voice sounded distant. When he finally shut his bedroom door, Leo slumped to the floor with a gasping inhale. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.

An urge so strong, he had no hope of denying it overtook him, and he opened the book once more. He silently read a different myth, this one about a being cursed to hold up the sky forever, lest it fall and crush himself and the rest of the world. The tears he didn’t understand scared him almost as much as the frigid cavern in his chest that ached as he read. Cold climbed up into his throat, choking him.

 

A few years later, Leo understood why Atlas’s pain felt like his own. It's only now, at age eighteen, that he's beginning to understand why Achilles scares him.

 

Leo looks out over the city and forces himself to breathe.

 

He’s learned that while he thinks of himself as straightforward, he might actually be the most complicated of his brothers. Despite this, there are things he knows for certain. He knows Raphael is fire. He is passion, empathy, desire, and determination. He crackles, consumes, and creates. Raph has never been afraid to proclaim that he is here. Perhaps this is why Leo has always envied him. He knows Donatello is earth. He is resilient, sturdy, sure of who he is and why. Donnie is both knowable and knowledgeable. Yet, he can change, if the right forces present themselves, and so Donnie is adaptable. He knows Michelangelo is wind. He is curious, ever present, whimsical, and energetic. Mikey can be a gentle comfort or a devastating force when the situation requires it. There is something about Mikey that feels impossible to capture.

Leo knows he is water. He’s calm unless provoked, relentless, shifting his form to best suit the environment he's found himself in. Now, he’s coming to realize that the depth of his soul may be akin to that of the ocean, and that the darkness that hides monsters who blessedly lurk where no one can see them, not even themselves, may very well represent parts of his mind.

 

He wipes tiredly at his eyes. He needs to return home, soon. He needs to see that they’re all still alive.

 

The skyscraper, Foot Headquarters, is surely becoming smaller and smaller as he leaves it behind him. Sometimes, he wonders if Karai will eventually renew her feelings of hatred towards him. Sometimes, he hopes she does. Sometimes, he thinks that maybe it wasn’t himself that he saw in her, but rather her in him.

It took Leo a long time to understand that you can love someone and not like them. He’d never liked Karai, not really. They were too different for him to care for her in that way. He’d love her for a time, though. He locks that sin up in the ice covered box that is his chest along with all of the others.

Meeting Usagi had helped him understand the difference between love in friendship’s absence, and love founded on its existence. Of course, there was no way his friend could harbor similar feelings, and this left Leo with a new kind of heartache, one borne of true pain, rather than frustration.

He reads poetry--in secret, though he’s not quite sure why--and wonders what it would be like to fill Usagi’s cup. With Karai, he thinks maybe he’d been trying to force them to drink from the same glass, and that’s why he never broke through to her.

 

The ice covering the manhole sears his fingers, cutting through thoughts he’d rather let lurk, anyway.

 

Maybe this was why his brothers love him, but don’t like him. How could they know him enough to like him, when he refuses to know himself?

He snorts at that. It echoes, loud and ugly in the sewers. Old wounds cannot be mistaken for new ones, or one risks infection. His brothers did like him. They’d all become closer over the years, and though they’d all experienced growing pains that had fostered isolation and therefore tension, they now all shared a kinship that was precious to him. Those old, self-deprecating fears had no place here, anymore.

The warmth of the Lair washes over him, the presence of his brothers flows into him. Peaceful, steady, deceptively consistent. He lets the tide that keeps him tethered and sane beat into him with gentle pressure. He smiles at his brothers, who in turn are smiling at him, huddled up on the couch while they watch a movie. This is the light that illuminates the ocean. Leo wonders what, or who, he’d be without it.

 

He thinks that, maybe, he’d be nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are greatly appreciated.


End file.
